Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: polysynthetic languages

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 23, 2003, 9:47
En réponse à Isidora Zamora :



> Alternatively, are >there any natural languages that fall below the morpheme-to-word ratio >needed to be considered polysynthetic, rather than merely synthetic, that >both mark the verb for both subject and object agreement and also mark >nouns for case?
I'm not sure, but I'd think Basque (Euskara) falls in this category. The language is agglutinative, and it has case marking on the nouns (purely ergative, and with a lot of spatial cases and *two* different genitives :)) ) and its verbs agree with the subject, the object and the beneficiary! (i.e. the nouns in the ergative, the absolutive and the dative). Note that an agreement affix for the beneficiary can be added to the verb even when there's no such beneficiary in the sentence. When it happens, the agreement affix is always second person, and indicates that the speaker wants to *include* somehow the listener in what he says. Spoken French has this feature too. Note that despite all that, Basque is quite rigidly SOV. One of the coolest features of Euskara has to be overdeclination. In Basque, you can sometimes add a case suffix to a noun *already* declined! For instance, we have the case suffix -z for the instrumental case, and -ko for the locative genitive. With "urre": gold, you can make "urrez": "with gold" and finally "urrezko": "golden, made in gold", as in "urrezko erraztuna": "the golden ring, the ring made in gold". You can also add the article to a noun already in the genitive to form some derivations. For instance, with the possessive genitive in -en, you can, from "harotzaren etxea": "the blacksmith's house", create "harotzarena": "the one of the blacksmith", and even decline it again as in "harotzarenaren izena": "the name of the one of the blacksmith". The book I have about Basque mentions the *word* of a child to his mother who asked him who he was playing with: "ponetarekilakoarekin": "with the one with the beret", the only full word here being "ponet": "beret"! The interlinear of this word is: ponet-a-(r)-ekil- a - ko -a-(r)-ekin beret-def. -com.-def.-loc.gen.-def. -com. def.: definite article com.: comitative case loc.gen.: locative genitive The r is in parentheses since it's there only because of hiatus between two vowels when adding affixes. And note that the comitative affix -ekin becomes -ekil- when followed by the article -a. However, although this seems like quite a thing, I don't think it means Euskara is polysynthetic. Such constructions can contain only one lexical root, which quite limits them. You get one-word sentences only if your sentence would contain in English only one verb and a few personal pronouns, so that hardly counts (in fact, since Euskara's conjugations are mainly periphrastic - with auxiliaries -, most of its sentences contain at least two words, just for the conjugated verb :)) . And both words are stressed). Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies

Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>